Electronic data, including text, graphics, voice, multimedia, and other strings of symbols, are commonly represented by binary codes. Binary coded data may be compressed in an effort to accurately represent the data while using as few bits as possible, thereby reducing the resources required for storing and/or transmitting the data. Binary codes of different or variable lengths may be used to represent different symbols in a bitstream of data. According to some binary code compression techniques, more frequently occurring symbols within a bitstream are represented with shorter codes, and less frequently occurring codes are represented using longer codes.
The codes used to represent the various symbols in a variable length coding (VLC) compression technique may be stored in a lookup table. A number of lookup tables may be required for a given VLC compression technique. The lookup table may be referenced when decoding a VLC bitstream to reconstruct the symbols represented by the various VLC codes therein. However, a relatively large number of bits may be required to represent some of the VLC symbols, particularly the less frequently occurring codes. Thus, a large amount of memory may be used to store a VLC lookup table in some typical implementations.